Updating the ScreenSteps Live manuals
We are about to push out an update to ScreenSteps Live that is going to require updating pretty much every lesson in the ScreenSteps online manual. We really aren't changing much of the functionality with this update but we are changing a key user interface element that shows up in almost every lesson. That means that all of those screen images need to be updated. A huge pain right? Well, yes. But not nearly as bad as it used to be before ScreenSteps 2. I am going to tell you how I am doing this to give you an idea of how it works. It is currently 10:34 am Monday morning and I am just about to get started.
Up until now I have always used our http://bmls.screenstepslive.com account to document ScreenSteps Live. But I want to have this documentation update ready before we post the changes to ScreenSteps Live so I need to create a documentation account on my local machine. This will be helpful down the road as well as I will be able to always go back to this account when I need to update lessons.
To do this I need to edit my local hosts file to trick my local server into finding the new subdomain I need to create. I can never remember how to do this. Just fired up ScreenSteps and luckily I have a lesson that I created that shows me how it's done. Just saved myself 5-15 minutes of hunting the internet for how to do this.
11:00 am - I have the new account created and have added some lessons to it so I have some material to work with. Now to get started updating the lessons.
I don't necessarily have all of my lessons for ScreenSteps Live organized into a topic on my local machine since I handle all of the topic organization on the ScreenSteps Live site itself. But I have tagged all of my ScreenSteps Live lessons with "ScreenSteps Live" which makes it really easy to find them. I open up my manual at http://bmls.screenstepslive.com/topics/15 and see that the first lesson is "ScreenSteps Live Overview". It definitely will need an update. So I load it up in ScreenSteps.
11:20 am - Had to get a few things running better on my local computer. Tracked my slowdown to a QuickSilver problem. I really have a love hate relationship with that app. It too often bogs down my system but I still keep coming back to it. Finally got started and noticed a CSS bug right away. No better way to test your app than to document. Going to fix that before continuing the documentation.
11:30 am - OK - all fixed. Back to work. Just noticed another display bug. Fixed it. And one more. This is turning into more of a display bug testing session than a documenting session. (This is actually almost always true. We find that we do our best bug testing when documenting our software using ScreenSteps.)
11:40 am - Now I really am going to update this lesson.
12:00 pm - Found another display bug. Fixed and ready to go again.
12:53 pm - Well, the internet went down (thank you Verizon) so I stopped to get some lunch. Internet is back up and the first lesson is finished updated. ScreenSteps Live allows me to replace the old lesson on ScreenSteps Live or create a new one. For this one I am just writing over the old one.
1:05 pm - Just updated an posted the 2nd lesson. Had to replace a couple of images in the lesson but ScreenSteps' replace image feature made that a breeze. Updated and posted.
1:10 pm - Two more lessons updated. One just had an old ui element on the left of the screenshot so I cropped it out.
1:50 pm - OK. I have updated and posted about 18-20 lessons. Almost all of them needed new images but replacing them was super easy. This next set of lessons has more significant changes so we will see how long that takes me.
2:40 - Done!
So, I started this morning at about 10:30 and finished a little after 2:30. More or less in 4 hours with a lunch break in there. If you look at my log you will see that most of the time was spent fixing bugs, getting my internet back up, etc. The actual updating of the lessons took very little time.
Let's compare this to how it could have been. If I had only been doing text documentation I would have finished in less time. But I never would have found those bugs. The simple fact that ScreenSteps makes me get images helps me find errors in the app right away.
If I had been creating videos I would now be ready to jump out the window. I would have had to start my video over at least 100 times - each time something unexpected happened.
I probably will still do a video at some point. But ScreenSteps has helped me scope everything out and make sure the flow actually works. And this documentation is all going live the same day as the update. That would have been impossible without ScreenSteps.